would give the chanson an oral ancestry after all). A third conjecture is that the print market and the
chance to make a quick profit caused musicians to lower their sights: this could be called the sell-out
theory.
These theories, while they all allude to factors that may have had a bearing on the situation and are
hence all plausible in some degree, are nevertheless completely speculative and somewhat circular. That
is, they are inferences drawn not from any evidence of the processes they describe, but from the nature of
the perceived result, the Parisian chanson itself. And they are all subject to refutation in some degree. For
one thing, the later history of sixteenth-century secular music (as we shall see) suggests that by the 1530s
Italian musicians were learning as much from the French as the other way around. For another, no
composer seems to have gotten rich during the sixteenth century on the basis of publication, printers
generally paying authors in kind, in printed copies rather than in cash.
The main generative influence on the new chanson style may not have been musical at all; it may well
have been the newly humanistic poetic idiom of Marot and his contemporaries that spurred the musicians.
Claudin’s chanson clothes the syllabification of its poem in a musical scansion that seems as strict and
formulaic as those we observed in the frottola. As Howard Mayer Brown, an important historian of the
genre, has noted, “some chanson melodies are virtually isorhythmic, so closely do they fit the patterned
repetitive rhythms of the poetry.”^6 This sharp observation tends not so much to confirm the direct
influence of the frottola on the chanson as it confirms the more general notion that national musical styles
arose out of vernacular poetic idioms, in this case the chanson rustique.
The opening long–short–short rhythm seems to suggest a dactylic meter, and its ubiquitous presence at
the beginnings of chansons has even misled some commentators into assuming that chanson verse was
largely made up of dactyls. But it is not a dactyl, and the reason why it became so conventional is worth a
small digression. For one thing, the initial “pseudodactyl” became an identifying tag, a sort of trademark
that identified the Parisian chanson and (more to the point) some later derivations from it. And for
another, it offers a stunning illustration of how from the very beginning of the “music business,” the
business side of music affected the artistic side.
Instead of a dactyl, the tag in question is just a three-syllable pickup that has been distended so that the
piece need not begin with a rest. In a scoreless notation without bars, upbeats could not be indicated in
relation to what followed; they could only be indentified as “off the beat” by preceding them with a rest.
Example 17-8a shows an alternative, “undistended” version of the pickup, notated the only way it could
have been at the time. The reason why such a rhythm was considered undesirable at the beginning of a
piece had nothing to do with any “purely musical” consideration. It was a purely practical matter having
to do with the way in which music was packaged for sale.
People singing a chanson together sang from printed part books, each of which contained only a single
line. The social consequences of that drab little fact are illustrated in the Flemish etiquette manual
mentioned above, which gives a model polite conversation for domestic music-making:
Rombout: Give me the bass part.
Antoni: I’ll do the tenor.
Dierick: Who’ll sing alto?
Ysaias: I, I’ll sing it!
Dierick: Who begins?
Ysaias: No, not I. I’ve a four-beat rest.
Antoni: And I one of six.
Ysaias: Well then, you come in after me?